Thanks KXCI Community Radio for hosting Maegan Lopez, Mission Garden Gardener and Cultural Outreach Liaison, on Cultivating Indigenous Voices. Take a listen to hear more about Maegan's passion for serving and supporting her community.

May 22, 2021 was clear and sunny, like most June days in Tucson. It was my first week as a Mission Garden volunteer and the day of the San Ysidro Festival. San Ysidro is the patron saint of farmers and laborers, and at Mission Garden, the day celebrates the wheat harvest. By 9 in the morning, it was already heating up. The field of wheat stood tall and golden. Board member, Jesus Garcia, was educating the assembled group of visitors and volunteers about the role of White Sonoran Wheat in the history of the Southwest.

This fall is your chance to volunteer for the first time, or to reconnect with our volunteer program. There are more ways than ever to help. Have you heard that quiet voice in your head saying “Hey, that would be a great place to volunteer—it’s peaceful and fun there.” This fall may be the time to act. Read more to find out how to start and all the ways volunteers help the garden.

This story begins largely with Sidney Engs, twin sister to Stephanie, who are both passionate volunteers at Mission Garden. For the last nine years, Sidney has been thinking and planning for how to bring an “Africa in the Americas” garden to life. After years of thinking on this idea, two years ago their research and plans really took off.

Did you know the Sonoran Desert is considered to have five seasons? Dry Summer, Wet Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring. These distinctions are important for gardeners and today more than ever, we benefit from the ancient agricultural wisdom of the O’odham people passed down through generations, who developed the first desert planting calendars.

Mission Garden’s timeline gardens would be not be complete without telling the story of Chinese people who lived, raised families, worked, and farmed in this area. Since the late 1800s, Chinese farmers have been part of our region’s history. These gardeners brought Chinese plant varieties with them, and also adapted to grow what they could sell to make a living. The Carrillo house here in Tucson was used by early Chinese immigrants to farm, and would sell their fresh vegetables by wagon. You can see what such a wooden wagon would look like when you visit Mission Garden.

For thousands of years, the ancestors of the Tohono O’odham, Hi’aced O’odham, Akimel O’odham, and On’t Akimel O’odham have cultivated crops on the site of the Mission Garden, making it one of the oldest sites in the country to still produce heritage crops. Maegan loves working with the Mission Garden because she believes in promoting healthy, desert food grown using traditional methods.

The Timeline Gardens of Mission Garden represent the multicolored fabric of people and cultures throughout history, celebrating and describing their similarities and differences through the language of plants and gardens. Gardens are ever-evolving, and our gardeners have been energized and invigorated while turning new soil and sowing new seeds. In the Pre-Contact O’odham Garden, Tohono O’odham 60-day corn seeds are just breaking through the surface of freshly formed beds, shaped with care and reverence for those who have farmed here for millenia. What a sight it will soon be: beds brimming with exuberant corn, broad leafed Ha:l squash, resilient teparies, and yellow O’odham melon, sure to quench our thirst on a summer afternoon.

Working in the garden for five years I’ve given a hundred garden tours. At first I tried to cover the basics. But now I’ve added a few bigger picture thoughts.

Now I talk about how we seem to be recreating not only heritage agriculture of many periods and peoples but how, in the process, we’re recreating historic ecosystems. The role chickens play in the garden. The way crops interact. The recolonization of the garden by birds, mammals, fish, frogs, snakes and insects that would have been those common on the floodplain through history.

New online content describes how Mission Garden cares for the land.

A spring full of festivals, a Top Chef surprise, inauguration of the new Africa in the Americas Garden and more…

For the recipe below, I went seeking the guidance and expertise of someone who has made it all her life. I called upon our friend Armida Elena Contreras de Maldonado, from the town of La Estancia on the Rio Sonora. Of course there are many fabulous cooks from that region, but in my small world she has no equal. She is especially known for her cakes, which are served at birthdays, quinceaneras, and weddings up and down the Rio Sonora Valley.

When looking for “a culinary hidden gem” for the final episode of hit show Top Chef, producers decided on Tucson. In turn, Mission Garden is a hidden gem within Tucson, and it was chosen for the filming of a portion of the show.